Linux from the Amazonas

I've heard of Dreamlinux from fellow members at one of the forums I frequent. They said it was beautiful, they
said it was easy. So I figured, I had to try it.

Dreamlinux is a Debian-based distro coming from Brazil. Known for their carefree approach to life and beauty,
the Brazilian developers have indeed put some of their spirit into the code, the result being Dreamlinux.

Our tasks for today ...

I'm going to test the distro, namely the Release Candidate of the upcoming version, 3.5. We'll see how it
behaves as a live CD, the difficulty of the installation process and the ease of use and configuration of
applications after the distro is installed.

I don't want to spoil the surprise, but you're in for a somewhat bumpy live CD fun, an unpleasant installation
and an absolutely stunning post-install experience. If you're up to it, read on.

A little more about Dreamlinux

The distro promises a lot. First, Dreamlinux 3.5 claims 100% multimedia support out of the box, something that
any living being using computers will appreciate. One of the major perceived advantages of Windows over Linux
distros is the support for proprietary audio and video formats, DVD playback and such.

Although I have already shown on several occasions how extremely easy it is to obtain these gadgets on a
variety of distros (Ubuntu, Linux
Mint, Sabayon etc), Dreamlinux should be the next step in having it all ready
and dandy.

Then, there's the issue of beauty. Dreamlinux comes with a very sexy Xfce desktop, adorned with the Avant
desktop manager, offering OSX-like looks with minimal hardware requirements. We have already seen OSX-like dock
and style on gOS Linux, an Ubuntu-based distro. Again, Dreamlinux aims to
take the bar one notch higher.

Requirements

As to the hardware requirements, you can safely run it on a machine with as little as 128MB RAM, which is
definitely appealing for people with old, low-end machines, which can be brought back to beautiful life by
running Dreamlinux.

Get Dreamlinux

You can download Dreamlinux from the official site, including the
current, stable versions and the Release Candidate. For support issues, you may want to try the forums.

Ready? Let's install Dreamlinux!

Now that we have almost everything covered, the usual last few words of advice:

If you are not familiar with Linux installations, you are encouraged to try my other tutorials, explaining the
Linux basics in rich detail. You will find all of the tutorials in the Software & security category.

The screenshots are all full-size images, in order to make the article more readable, but they may take some
time loading on the 56K dial-up connections.

Lastly, if you are afraid of trying to install Dreamlinux for real, you are welcome to try the distribution in
a virtualized environment. Excellent products like VMware
Player, VMware Server, VirtualBox are all great choices for this task. The setup and use of these
products are also extensively covered in the above category.